Booking is now open for the Artes Mundi Conference. Pay by Paypal on this site or contact Artes Mundi directly to reserve your place.

Artes Mundi 5 continues to explore an exciting range of distinctive practices drawn from a community of international contemporary artists. Within this year’s shortlist, there are threads of commonality but also divergences in form, narrative and conceptual framework.

Artes Mundi recognises the importance of selecting diverse, thought provoking work around questions of place and community while also being aware of its shifting and complex relationship to the art market. In an increasingly globalised world where boundaries or borders are being configured, erased and redefined, artists can offer a vital and unexpected commentary on such processes. Here the values associated with subjectivity and identity, mass and high culture, remembering and forgetting, are often blurred and contested to become sites of resistance in pursuit of more expansive accounts of social and political life.

Social Contours / Art at the Borders is a one-day event where the Artes Mundi 5 shortlisted artists, selectors and curator, come together with historians and critics to talk about their work. Three formal presentations will provide alternative frames of reference from Dai Smith, Raymond Williams Chair of Cultural History, Swansea University; Alexis Nuselovici, Chair of Modern Cultural Studies, Cardiff University and Esra Aysun, Director of The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul. Roundtable discussions will include artists Miriam Bäckström, Tania Bruguera, Phil Collins, Sheela Gowda, Teresa Margolles, Darius Mikšys and Apolonija Šušteršič in conversation with the selectors Anders Kreuger (M HKA, Antwerp) and Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy (Mercosul Biennial, Pôrto Alegre and Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Caracas and New York) and Ben Borthwick (Artistic Director of Artes Mundi 5).

The day concludes with a reception at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff. Chapter will also host the world première of Miriam Bäckström’s play ‘Motherfucker’ at 7pm and 9pm (ticketed event), booking in advance recommended – Chapter (029) 2030 4400 www.chapter.org

On the morning of 29th November, there will be a follow-on event in the form of plenary session ‘The Morning After the Day Before’, at Amgueddfa Cymru-National Museum Wales from 10.30-11.30am with Heike Roms (Aberystwyth University), Nicholas Thornton (AC-NMW), Iwan Bala (University of Wales: Trinity St David) and Alfredo Cramerotti (Mostyn) in conversation with Russell Roberts (University of Wales, Newport).